Formation 2001 Official language English | Type Web site | |
Motto Monitoring the legal climate for Internet activity Location San Francisco, California, United States | ||
Lumen, formerly Chilling Effects, is a collaborative archive created by Wendy Seltzer and founded along with several law school clinics and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect lawful online activity from legal threats. Its website, Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, allows recipients of cease-and-desist notices to submit them to the site and receive information about their legal rights and responsibilities.
Contents
Inception
The archive was founded in 2001 by Internet activists who were concerned that the unregulated private practice of sending cease-and-desist letters seemed to be increasing and was having an unstudied, but potentially significant, "chilling effect" on free speech.
The archive got a boost when Google began submitting its notices to the site in 2002. Google began to do so in response to the publicity generated when the Church of Scientology convinced Google to remove references and links to an anti-Scientology web site, Operation Clambake, in April 2002. The incident inspired vocal Internet users and groups to complain to Google, and links to the Clambake site were restored. Google subsequently began to contribute its notices to Chilling Effects, archiving the Scientology complaints and linking to the archive.
Starting in 2002, researchers used the clearinghouse to study the use of cease-and-desist letters, primarily looking at Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) 512 takedown notices, non-DMCA copyright issues, and trademark claims.
On November 2, 2015, Chilling Effects announced its renaming to Lumen,as well as a number of international partnerships.
Reception
Copyright holders complained that by republishing the URLs of infringing content after those URLs were removed from search engines, the database subverted the intent of the DMCA and was "the largest repository of URLs hosting infringing content on the internet." The Copyright Alliance representative has described the project as "repugnant". The critics, in turn, have been labelled by some as "censorship defenders". The site's supporters have commended it for being a major supporter of transparency regarding copyright take-downs.